The New Life (12 page)

When evening fell, we all left the high school building, men leading the women, and made our way to a restaurant. A tacit sense of hostility was palpable in the streets throughout the town. We were being observed from the doorways of barber shops and grocery stores which were still open for business, the coffeehouse where the TV was going, and the lighted windows of the government building. One of the storks mentioned by the handsome fellow was watching us enter the restaurant from the tower in the square where it was perched. Was it with curiosity? Or hostility?

The restaurant was a proper place with an aquarium and flower pots, the walls were hung with pictures of eminent Turks, a historical submarine that had gone down in honor, soccer players with lopsided heads, purple figs, golden pears, and frolicking sheep. When the place had quickly filled with the dealers and their wives, high school students and teachers, and all those who loved and had faith in us, I felt as if I had been anticipating this congregation and preparing for a night such as this all these many months. I began drinking along with others but then ended up drinking more than anyone else. I sat with the men, clinking raki glasses with those who kept coming to sit next to me, talking hungrily of honor, the missing meaning of life, of things that had been lost.

Well, it was because they brought up the subject first, but I found myself in such total agreement with a friendly man that we were both terribly surprised; he had pulled a pack of playing cards out of his pocket and proudly showed me the face cards on which he had drawn with his own hand, changing the king into “sheik” and the jack into “disciple,” and explained at length the reason why it was high time that cards like these should be distributed in the hundred and seventy thousand coffeehouses where card games are played in our country at close to two and a half million card tables.

Hope was among us in some form this evening, but was hope the same as the angel? It is a form of light, they said. They said: we dwindle a little each time we draw a breath. They said: we are digging up the things we have buried. One of them showed a picture of a stove. Another fellow said: A bicycle that fits our size perfectly. The man with the bow tie produced a bottle of liquid: works like toothpaste. A toothless old man regretted that he was forced to abstain from drink but he told us his dream: He tells us, never fear; you won't disappear. Who was He? Doctor Fine who was privy to abstruse matters had not yet put in an appearance. Why was he not here? If truth be told, a voice said, had Doctor Fine met this fine young man, he would have loved him like his own son. Whose voice was it? He had disappeared by the time I turned around. Ssssh! they said; don't throw around Doctor Fine's name! When the angel appears on TV sooner or later, there will be hell to pay. All this is the district governor's doing, all this fear, they said; but he is not totally against us either. The richest man in Turkey, Vehbi Koç himself, could very well arrive here as our invited guest. Why not? someone commented; Koç is after all the king of all us entrepreneurs.

I remember being kissed on the cheeks, congratulated for being so young, and after I explained to them about TV screens, colors and time, being hugged for being so candid. You just wait, said the pleasant man who ran the State Monopolies store; our television screen will be the final curtain for those who are after us; the new screen means, after all, the new life. People kept coming to sit next to me; I also kept changing seats and telling people all about accidents, death, peace, the book, and that moment … I sensed I had gone too far when I began saying, “Love…” I rose to see Janan where she sat being interviewed by school teachers and teachers' wives. I sat down and said, “Time is an accident; we are here in this world by accident.” They called out to a farmer who wore a leather jacket, telling me here was the fellow I must hear out, seeing how I was interested in time. “You give me too much credit,” the fellow said, breathing like an old man although he did not seem very old, and he produced from the inner pocket of his jacket his “modest” invention. It was just a pocket watch, but one sensitive to bliss; it stopped when you were happy so that your blissful hour could persist for all eternity; and conversely, when you were in despair, the small and big hand speeded up tremendously, making you remark how quickly time had passed and how your sorrows had ended in the blink of an eye. Then at night while you slept peacefully, the watch—this little object that patiently ticked away in the palm of the man, who was quite old—adjusted time by subtracting it from your lifetime, and when you rose in the morning along with everybody else, you were not any older.

“Time,” I said and stared for a moment at the fish gliding ever so slowly in the aquarium. Someone came up to me like a shadow. “They accuse us,” he said, “of being hostile to Western culture. In fact, it's not true. Did you know, for example, that leftover Crusaders lived for centuries in the rock-cut dwellings in Cappadocia?” Who was the speaking fish who spoke to me when I had been only talking to the fish? When I turned around, he was gone. At first I said to myself it had been just a shadow, then I was frightened when I caught a whiff of that formidable smell: OP shaving soap.

As soon as I sank into a chair, an avuncular man with a handlebar mustache began interrogating me, nervously winding around one of his fingers the chain of his key ring: Who were my folks, how did I vote, which invention had caught my fancy, what would be my decision in the morning? I was still thinking about the fish and I was going to offer him another glass of raki when I heard voices, voices, voices. I kept quiet and then found myself next to the good-natured Monopolies dealer. He told me he no longer feared anyone, not even the district governor who had a problem with the stuffed rats in his shop window. Why was there only one company selling liquor in this country, a state monopoly? I remembered something which frightened me, and the fear made me say the first thing that came to my mind. “If life is a journey,” I said, “I have been on the road for six months, and I learned a thing or two which, with your permission, I would like to impart.” I had read a book, and I had lost my whole world. I had set out on the road to find a new world. What had I found? It felt as if you were about to say, O Angel, what it was that I had found. I fell silent for a moment and pondered, but I didn't know what I was saying when I blurted out: “Angel.” And, as if waking up from a dream, I began to look for you in the crowd, suddenly having remembered: Love. There she was among appliance dealers and their wives, the man with the bow tie and his daughters, it was Janan dancing with some presumptuous overgrown high school boy to the music from a radio somewhere while school teachers and senile geriatric cases looked on temperately.

I sat down and smoked a cigarette. If only I knew how to dance … like the bride and groom in the movies. I had some coffee. Time according to the watch that gauged happiness must have been going full speed ahead. Another cigarette. Applause for the dancing couples. More coffee. Janan went back to be with the women. Yet another coffee.

I pressed myself close to Janan on our way back to the hotel like all the provincials and district appliance dealers who had taken their wives' arms. Who was that high school boy? How does he know you? The stork must be watching us from the tower where it was perched. We had just been given the key for Room 19 by the night clerk as if we were really husband and wife, when someone who looked like he knew what he was doing and was more determined than anyone else thrust his large and sweaty body between us and waylaid me.

“Mr. Kara,” he said, “if you have a moment…”

Police! I thought; he is on to us that we inherited the identifications and the marriage certificate from the victims of a traffic accident.

“I wonder if it's possible for us to talk?” the man went on. He acted as if he wanted to talk man to man. How delicately Janan left us alone, how graceful she was in her print skirt, going up the stairs with the key to Room 19 in her hand!

The man was not a native of the town of Güdül, but I forgot his name as soon as he mentioned it; let us say his name was Mr. Owl, based on the fact that he was talking to me so late at night, but perhaps Owl was associated in my mind with the caged canary in the lobby which had been hopping up and down and against the wires when Mr. Owl began to speak.

“They are wining and dining us now,” he said, “but tomorrow they will ask us to vote. Have you thought about it? Tonight I canvassed not only the dealers from this district but each and every one that came from all over the country. All hell might break loose tomorrow, so I want you to think about it now. Have you thought it through? You are the youngest dealer among us. Who has your vote?”

“Who do you think I should vote for?”

“Not for Doctor Fine, that's for sure! Believe me, brother—if I may call you brother—it's all nothing but a misadventure. Can angels be said to commit sin? Is it possible to deal with all the difficulties that trouble us? There is no way that we can be ourselves any longer, a fact that even the well-known columnist Jelal Salik realized, which led to his suicide; it's someone else who's writing the column under his name. Every rock you lift, there they are, the Americans. Sure it's sad to realize we will never be ourselves again, but mature assessment may save us from disaster. So our sons and grandsons no longer understand us, so what? Civilizations come and civilizations go. What are you going to do? Believe you are all set when your civilization is on the move? And then, when things begin to run down, grab your gun like some loudmouth kid? Who do you kill when it's the whole population assuming a different guise? How can the angel be an accessory to the crime? Besides, who is this angel anyway? What's this business of collecting old stoves, compasses, children's magazines, clothespins? Why is the angel supposedly against books and print? We all try to live meaningful lives, but we are all stymied at some point. Who among us can be himself? Who's the lucky person that hears the angels whisper? It's all speculation, empty words meant to dupe the unwary. Things are getting out of hand. Have you heard? They say Koç is on his way, Vehbi Koç. The authorities won't let it happen. The innocent will suffer along with the guilty. The demonstration of Doctor Fine's television has been put off until tomorrow. Why do you suppose he's getting special treatment? He's the one herding us into this misadventure. They say he will explain the Cola affair; it's madness; this is not why we came to this convention.”

He was ready to say more, but a man wearing a scarlet tie came into the space, which didn't deserve to be called a lobby. Owl said, “They will be all night now, tackling and blocking,” and he took off. I saw him follow another dealer out into the dark night.

I stood at the foot of the stairs where Janan had gone up. I felt feverish, my legs were shaking; perhaps it was the alcohol or the coffee, but I was having palpitations and there was perspiration on my forehead. I didn't go up the stairs but ran to the phone booth in the corner, dialed, the line was busy, I dialed again, got the wrong number, I dialed your number, Mom: “Mom, I said, I'm getting married, Mom, do you hear me? I am getting married tonight, in a little while, now, in fact we're already married, she's upstairs in the room, there's a staircase, I married an angel, Mom, don't cry, I swear I will come home, don't you cry, Mom, I will come back with an angel on my arm.”

Why hadn't I realized before that there was a mirror right behind the canary cage? It was odd seeing it as I went up the stairs.

Room 19, it was the room where Janan opened the door, greeted me holding a cigarette in her hand, then went back to the open window where she had been watching the town square; the room seemed like someone else's hometown which had suddenly become hospitable to us. Quiet. Warm. Low light. Twin beds.

The town's somber light came through the open window, defining Janan's long neck and her hair, and a nervous and impatient wisp of cigarette smoke (or did it only seem so?) rose out of Janan's mouth, which I couldn't see, up toward a kind of dolorous darkness that insomniacs, restless sleepers, and the dead in the town of Güdül had for many years been breathing into the sky. A drunk laughed downstairs; someone, perhaps a dealer, slammed a door. I saw Janan toss her cigarette out the window without putting it out, and then like a child she watched the cigarette's orange tip doing somersaults as it fell. I too went to the window and glanced down into the street and the town square, but without seeing anything. Then we both looked out the window for a long time as if contemplating the cover of a new book.

“You too were drinking, weren't you?” I said.

“I was drinking,” Janan said congenially.

“How long will this go on?”

“Do you mean the road?” Janan said lightly, indicating the route leading from the town square to the cemetery before it reached the bus terminal.

“Where do you think it will end?”

“I don't know,” said Janan. “But I want to go as far as it goes. Isn't that better than sitting around waiting?”

“The money is almost all gone,” I said.

The dark corners in the road Janan had pointed out a moment ago were now completely lit by the powerful headlights of some vehicle which drove into the town square and parked in a vacant space.

“We will never get there,” I said.

“You're even more drunk than I am,” said Janan.

The man who emerged from the car locked the door and walked toward the hotel without becoming aware of us; he first stepped on Janan's cigarette stub like someone thoughtlessly squashing out someone else's life, and then he entered the Hotel Trump.

A prolonged silence fell over Güdül, as if this charming little town were completely deserted. A few dogs exchanged barks in the distance, then everything grew silent once more. The leaves of the plane and chestnut trees on the square moved in the breeze now and then, but there was no sound of rustling. We must have stood silently at the window for a long time, looking out like children anticipating something that was going to be fun. It was some sort of perceptual illusion, but though I was aware of every second I couldn't say if time was passing or if it was on hold.